A Question of Guilt

18

'So he filleted her?' suggested Eliot.

Dr Bernard Spilsbury nodded. He was tall, straight-backed, handsome, his thick dark hair brilliantined, a red carnation in the lapel of his grey suit. Eliot thought him solemn, aloof and self-opinionated. He thought Eliot cynical and flippant. Both were young doctors of exceptional intelligence with energy as limitless as their ambition.

'If the remains are Belle Elmore's,' Eliot said.

'Oh, I'm sure of that.' Spilsbury was always precise, brief and confident. Eliot had a lingering feeling that he treated his acquaintances as interesting subjects on which he was performing the post-mortem.

It was mid-September. The trial at the Old Bailey was fixed for the eighteenth of the following month. Spilsbury unlocked a cupboard on the wall of his small laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, near Paddington Station. It contained five large glass jars, covered like homemade pickles by glazed white paper tied with tape. Spilsbury's finger indicated the blue-edged labels which might have read 'Onions' or 'Tomato Chutney'.

'That's the stomach, with one kidney and the heart-fatty, obviously of a plump person-and part of the liver. The next contains a pair of female woollen combinations, found under the cellar floor with a female undervest. The next, small gut, more liver and some hair. The last more gut, some muscle and two lungs. When you savoured the Crippen's hospitality you may have observed this garment airing on a clothes-horse.'

Spilsbury untied the cover of the last bottle, removing with forceps a long strip of green and white flannel. 'The most damning specimen of the case. A piece of pyjamas, found with the organs. Note the curious arrangement of green lines. Exactly like those we know Mrs Crippen bought from the admirable Jones Brothers of Holloway, on January 5, 1909, for seventeen-and-ninepence, cash on delivery by the firm's cart.' His forceps reached for a metal clip with a six-inch tuft. 'A Hinde's curler, as used by Mrs. Crippen.

'Eliot nodded. 'I recognize the hair.'

'Luckily, hair is one of the last anatomical structures to decompose.' He dropped it back. 'If you remain unconvinced, Beckett, I can show you a strip of lower abdominal skin, with a longitudinal midline scar from umbilicus to pubis. The ovarotomy operation Mrs Crippen underwent at New York in 1893. Doubtless, the defence will try passing it off as a fold in the skin. But it's a scar, right enough, pure fibrous tissue without the sebaceous glands one would find in skin. I have examined it under the microscope, which I shall bring with me to the Old Bailey and invite the jury to see for themselves.'

'Isn't that rather _coup de thйвtre?' _murmured Eliot, feeling that the pathologist fitted the crime.

'Not at all. I am responsible for my own opinion, which has been formed on my own scientific knowledge. I can demonstrate to the jury exactly how I formed it.' He retied the jar. Eliot supposed that Spilsbury's professional attention to Crippen would make his reputation, like Bernard Dawson's to King Edward VII in his own inevitably final days.

'You believe that the hyoscine which killed Belle Elmore was administered inadvertently?' Spilsbury locked the cupboard.

'With good reason. Crippen confided in me that he was giving her hyoscine in homoeopathic doses to dampen her sexual demands.'

'The half grain I found in the body was hardly a homoeopathic dose,' Spilsbury said mockingly. 'It would slay a prize-fighter. Crippen was lying to you, as to everyone else. You know they slept in separate rooms?'

'So do our kings and queens, but we never lack heirs to the throne.'

'I don't think you can compare the arrangements in Buckingham Palace with those in Hilldrop Crescent. Well, if you feel strongly he's innocent, you'd better pass your notions on to Tobin.'

Eliot nodded. A A Tobin was the King's Counsel briefed to defend Crippen, a barrister on the northern circuit whose oratory customarily mingled with the sea fogs of Newcastle. 'I wanted to interest Marshall Hall, but he's abroad on holiday. Anyway, I couldn't get further than Crippen's solicitor. Is Arthur Newton good? I heard he organized the defence of Oscar Wilde.'

'He seems to specialize in that sort of thing. He defended Lord Arthur Somerset over the male brothel in Cleveland Street, and got six weeks himself for spiriting away the three telegraph boys involved. I hear he's up to his ears in racing debts, and I suppose wants to boost his reputation. Horatio Bottomley-you know, he edits the despicable _John Bull_-is putting up the cash for Crippen's defence. As an advertising stunt, of course.'

'Who's on the other side?'

'Richard Muir will be leading for the Crown. A red-faced Scot, with the forensic subtlety of a whirring claymore. The judge is Lord Alverstone.'

'Who's he?'

Spilsbury looked shocked. 'The Lord Chief Justice.'

'Murderers are remembered, their judges never.'

Spilsbury was moving towards the laboratory door. 'Perhaps you're right, Beckett, and Crippen never did mean to kill his wife with hyoscine.' Eliot looked surprised at the admission. 'He intended to shoot her. Dew found a revolver and 45 rounds of ammunition in the breakfast room next to the cellar. But perhaps Crippen was concerned over the noise disturbing the neighbours. Everyone says he was such a considerate man.'

'Hasn't it occurred to you that she could have swallowed the hyoscine entirely by accident?' Eliot was becoming irritated with Spilsbury's sarcasm.

'The henbane plant which contains hyoscine is sometimes eaten in mistake for parsnips,' he replied authoritively.

'Which in January are not in season.'

Eliot wrote three times to Mr A A Tobin, KC at his chambers in the Middle Temple. He had no reply. He supposed despondently that every post brought a hundred letters of lunatic notions for freeing his client. The week before the trial he marched in himself, but the barrister's clerk's peevishness withstood even Eliot's determination. He strode back to the Strand disappointed and angry, though reflecting that a man's lawyers, like his surgeons, required to operate without assistance from interested passers-by.

Crippen was to stand trial alone. Eliot attended the fourth day in Court No 1 at the Old Bailey. It was Friday, October 21, and Spilsbury had usefully provided a ticket. He watched the show in the company of two theatrical knights-Tree the tragidian and Hare the comedian-and Miss Phyllis Dare, the Belle of Mayfair, who was gallantly invited by His Lordship the judge to sit beside him on the bench.

The court had oak panelling and atrocious acoustics. Below the Royal Arms and Sword of Justice sat also the Lord Mayor of London, the Lord Mayor-elect of London, the Recorder of London, two London Aldermen, the Sheriff of London and his undersheriffs. Mrs Martinetti was in a row below with other flashily feathered vultures from the Music Hall Ladies' Guild. Eliot felt a shock at seeing Crippen suddenly appear five yards away, in the witness-box beside the jury. He looked more cheerful than six months previously, when dressed in mourning for his wife. Eliot decided against some small, encouraging gesture towards the prisoner, lest Lord Alverstone ordered his own removal instantly to the cells.

Wigged and gowned, red-faced and square-jawed, eyebrows like iron filings, Mr Muir was cross-examining.

'On the early morning of February 1, you were left alone in your house with your wife?'

'Yes.'

'She was alive?'

'She was.'

'Do you know of any person in the world who has seen her alive since?'

'I do not.'

'Do you know of any person in the world who has ever had a letter from her since?'

'I do not.'

'Do you know any person in the world who can prove any fact showing that she ever left that house alive?'

'Absolutely not.'

Had Crippen asked at the York Road cabstand whether lady and luggage had left while he was at business? Had he asked the neighbours? The tradesmen? At the shipping offices? Anywhere at all? Advertised in American papers? Eliot stared disbelievingly while Crippen agreed in his mild, vague way of doing no such things, as though in a railway lost property office describing the mislaying of his umbrella.

Why did he flee in July? Because of suspicion, Crippen explained. Suspicion of what? Suspicion of being concerned with his wife's disappearance. On what charge? He apologized for knowing nothing of the law, but he was a reader of romances to a great extent, and had an idea that he might be arrested and held on suspicion until she was found.

'You stayed with Le Neve disguised as your son in a hotel in Antwerp?'

'Yes.'

'You stayed indoors all day?'

'Oh, no. We went to the Zoological Gardens.'

The man's behaving as though charged with riding a bicycle without a lamp or having no dog licence, Eliot thought irritably and dejectedly. His quaint Gemьltlichkeit had worsened. Now it was pathological euphoria. Or perhaps he was colour-blind to the myriad hues between right and wrong? Did he risk his neck as a pure moralist, who saw sin and virtue only as black and white? The skin with the scar was being shown him, on an enamel plate from which people ate their dinners. Crippen gave it a mild look through his gold-rimmed glasses. He did not recognise it as Belle's. The court adjourned for lunch.

Eliot decided against returning. The trial was bear-baiting a donkey, fox-hunting a lap-dog. Thick crowds crammed round the brand new granite court, Justice without her blindfold atop its copper dome, stones from Dickens' Newgate prison in its foundations. The police had been on duty since seven in the morning. There had been five thousand applications to the Sheriff for seats.

Eliot pushed into the _Magpie and Stump_ public house opposite. The landlord would remember him as a student at St Bartholomew's up the road. A pink-faced young man with a fringe of ginger beard, in shiny blue suit and bowler, asked cheerfully, 'Dr Beckett, isn't it? A chum on the _Mail_ pointed you out. I'm at the _Bugle. _I hear that you're acquainted with Crippen?'

'Slightly. I had dinner at his house.'

'At Hilldrop Crescent?' The reporter looked as though Eliot had supped with the Devil in Hell. 'Go on! What was it like?'

'I refuse to discuss my personal affairs.'

'The public would like to know.'

'Then the public is a prying nuisance, and deserves disappointment.'

'Any views on the trial?' he persisted.

'Yes, I have,' Eliot said forcefully. 'It should be held in the Drury Lane Theatre. It's perfectly disgusting, men and women who wear the airs of leaders in our society, hastening to gloat over another poor human in his agony. I'm equally repulsed by the mass of ordinary British people, who assume this man guilty as unthinkingly as that the sun will rise and the public houses open every morning. They would like him hanged from Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, on a Saturday afternoon so they could take a picnic and enjoy it.'

'That's coming a bit strong, doctor,' the reporter complained amiably. 'From one who stood as a Labour candidate.'

'Truth is a distant relative of politics and newspapers, I fear. Every man Jack of you on Fleet Street knows your proud columns about this trial 'showing British justice at its best' are humbug, for which the public has an insatiable appetite. Look how they've made a hero of plodding Inspector Dew, who let the pair slip from under his nose and gain a fortnight's lead on him, then spent three days searching at Hilldrop Crescent before showing enough intelligence to dig up the loose bricks of the cellar floor. Look at the ridiculously melodramatic Captain Kendall, with his amazing discovery that a boy with wide hips and large breasts might be a girl. By the wits of their pursuers, Dr Crippen and Miss Le Neve deserve to be living peacefully in California by now. Yet the fuddled British public sees the voyage to Father Point as the most spectacular stroke of revenge since Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.'

'What wood was that, doctor?'

'Birnam. No "h".'

The reporter nodded, busy with his notebook. 'But wouldn't you agree with everyone doctor, the Crippen case has shown how the law has new weapons?'

'Wireless simply caught the imagination of the feckless public like a new show at the fairground.'

'Against Marconi, are you, doctor?' asked the reporter encouragingly.

'I'm against no one except-if I may be frank-your editors and proprietors, who hope to see fortunes and titles sprout from fields so assiduously spread with manure.'

'How about a photo?' He indicated a cloth-capped youth beside him with a glass of gin-and-water and a camera.

'As you like,' Eliot agreed off-handedly.

Eliot learned in the _Magpie and Stump_ a principle which twenty years later assisted him to worldly success-never address the most insignificant representative of the press without care, caution and cunning. He sent Laura the parlourmaid for a copy of the _Bugle_ before breakfast. She returned with eyes sparkling excitedly. 'You're all over the front page, sir, photograph and everything.'

Eliot stood before the freshly-lit fire in the dining-room. CRIPPEN'S FRIEND, said the headline. 'THE STUPID BRITISH PUBLIC,' he was quoted below.

_The most amazing statement of Crippen Week was made outside the Old Bailey by Dr Eliot Beckett, self-appointed 'People's Doctor' of Holloway,_ it began.

Eliot ran his eye through the column. From his censure of Inspector Dew, he might have attacked Wellington the morning after Waterloo. From his acquaintance with Crippen, he might have played surgical assistant disembowelling Belle and second gravedigger in the cellar.

_Dr Beckett, who pretends to be the people's friend, gives free treatment in a greengrocer's shop round the corner from Hilldrop Crescent,_ Eliot read. _'Very strange treatment! Mouldy bread!! The _Bugle_ asked the King's physician, Dr Bernard Dawson of the London Hospital, if mouldy bread ever did anyone any good. 'None whatever,' said the King's doctor. 'It seems a cranky notion to me.'

Perhaps Dr Beckett is obliging the neighbours, by getting rid of their old loaves?

Dr Beckett stood for Parliament in the election as Labour candidate for Holloway-at which he dismally failed-while despising those he urged to vote for him. Perhaps he wants a seat in Parliament at all costs? The doctor is moons away from the working man he claims to represent. He does not lack money. He enjoys with a wealthy American lady the same relationship our readers will have read about elsewhere in Holloway._

Eliot handed the paper silently to Nancy, who came downstairs in her nurse's uniform. She read it calmly. 'Is it libellous?'

'Only infuriating, I'm afraid. Robert Knox had to tolerate the same sort of thing at Edinburgh in the 1820s. He taught anatomy, and after the Burke and Hare murders the newspapers whipped up feeling against him. He was as upright as I am, and traded with body-snatchers only for the sake of his students, just like any other surgeon.'

'You're taking it very calmly.'

'How else can I? If I wrote complaining, they'd make me look a bigger fool than ever.'

'How do they find all this about us?'

'The patients. Perhaps our servants. In Holloway, you can learn a lot about a man for sixpence.'

Laura threw open the door without knocking. 'Oh sir-' She looked frightened. 'The baker's boy's just said that something terrible's happening down at the surgery, sir. They're breaking the windows, sir.'

Eliot jumped up. He told Nancy to stay in the house, seized his hat and muffler, and strode in the bright autumn morning to the corner of Brecknock Road. He stopped. A crowd of men and women were shouting and gesticulating in the street outside the surgery. Two policemen separated them from the smashed-in shopfront, urging everyone to move along. Heads stuck from windows. The pavements were choked with those who preferred to be spectators rather than perpetrators, and some fifty excited children.

Eliot strode on angrily. The mob outside were the same who had sat inside, the slaughtermen, market porters and their families. They had come from the pubs, Eliot knew, and in a mood of mindless bellicosity. He wondered how many were literate enough to spell out the front page of _the Bugle. _He supposed its story had run round the neighbourhood, gaining strength as it passed from mouth to mouth, like the germs men were continually breathing over each other.

'I'm Dr Beckett.' A third policeman was regarding the affray from the corner. 'That's my premises they're damaging.' The policeman held out an arm. 'Shouldn't go down there, if I were you, sir.'

'I'm not frightened of people who attack nothing more dangerous than plate-glass.'

A grey-haired woman in a shawl pointed at Eliot from the edge of the crowd. 'There 'e is! That's the doctor. That's 'im. Friend o' Crippen.'

Eliot found himself suddenly the centre of a jeering, jostling circle. 'Mouldy bread!' they shouted at him. 'Murderer!' screamed another woman. 'Crippen! Crippen!' yelled the rest. It was the fashionable malediction. Eliot remembered Belle on the stage at the Metropolitan.

'None 'o that,' the policeman directed, adding urgently, 'Run along, sir, while the going's good.'

'I refuse to be intimidated by a mob.'

'Go on, sir! Crippen's a strong word.'

Eliot felt a flick against his cheek. He raised his fingertips. Someone had spat at him. 'Contempt is impossible from the contemptible,' he snapped. He turned and strode away, pursued by boos.

He had sat almost quarter of an hour glaring into the fire, legs stretched, arms folded, unspeaking, Nancy on the arm of his chair.

'I'm never going back to the surgery,' he announced.

She said in her practical way, 'Then you'd better get the window boarded up, or you'll have the place looted.'

'They can help themselves to as much mouldy bread as they please.' He added despondently, 'It doesn't work, anyway. The Bugle was right.'

There was a timid tap, Laura reappeared, looking more frightened than ever. A policeman was at the door. Eliot found an inspector, in cape and shako. He warned gravely that the inflamed people of Holloway would find Eliot's address, fill the street outside, break his own windows. The inspector advised him to lie low somewhere. There was the safety of the American lady to consider. He's been reading the Bugle too, Eliot thought.

'Lie low? For how long?' Eliot asked.

'Just till they've hanged Crippen,' the inspector assured him blandly.

Eliot returned to the dining room. 'We're moving this morning.'

'Where to?'

'The Savoy.'

'But we can't!' Nancy objected.

'Why not?'

'We're not married,' she pointed out.

'Oh, very well! We'll get married. We'll use a registry office. They're quite fashionable.'

She put her arms around him. 'Oh, Eliot! You are so romantic.'

He smiled. 'I suppose your father would have loved a show in New York?'

'He's reconciled that his daughter's an oddity. He bears me no rancour. I'm just a business bid which failed, I guess.' She kissed him. 'You're really as romantic as Romeo, aren't you, dearest? But you always want to seem absolutely different from everyone else.'

'From now on, I'm going to be absolutely the same as everyone else. But I'm going to be better at it.'

Eliot took a Savoy suite with two bedrooms. Guests however wealthy were not permitted by the management to sleep there with ladies other than their wives, or who allowed themselves to be passed as such. At 2.15 the following afternoon, the Old Bailey jury retired. Twenty-seven minutes later, they returned. Barely a minute afterwards, everyone stood except the judge. His elderly clerk, in his best morning coat, laid on his Lordship's wig a square of black silk. The judge reminded the prisoner that he had cruelly poisoned his wife, concealed his crime, mutilated her body, disposed piecemeal of her remains, possessed himself of her property and fled from justice. On the ghastly and wicked nature of the crime, the judge would not dwell. He assured its convicted perpetrator that he had no hope of escaping its consequences and recommended making peace with Almighty God.

'I have now to pass upon you the sentence of the Court,' continued Lord Alverstone. 'Which is that you be taken from hence to a lawful prison,' he spelt out with the law's ghoulish relish, 'from thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be buried in the precincts of the prison where you shall have last been confined after your conviction.' Implying that his judicial exhortation extended further, he ended his grisly catalogue, 'And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.'

_The prisoner was removed in the charge of the warders,_ Eliot read in his _Times_ on Monday morning. Crippen's amen, he thought.